For some years now, organisations have been looking at ways to reduce the overall IT budget and spend. Sometimes, such initiatives are pushed from the employees, onto the organisations, as new technologies are released to the markets.

Given the large amount of smartphone offerings in the market, and people’s desire to own these devices, smartphones started to become a gadget that everybody could own. As a result of employees started bringing in their own devices, they placed requests with the local IT teams to provide access to corporate emails and other data on these smartphones. This poses a challenge for the IT departments as they now have to develop systems and process for securing these unsupported devices. Organisations quickly realised that this could be done by enabling certain solutions within the infrastructure. However, the challenge of managing these devices was still a challenge.

Bring Your Own Device or ‘BYOD’, and was “born” as a direct outcome of staff bringing in their own devices. Organisations have to embrace this new movement and work on catching up with their systems and processes.

One of the benefits of allowing the BYOD initiative was that staff would be more productive, also when away from the office, as they have access to e.g. email all the time. However, there are obviously certain risks associated with this and not all staff could get access to their email for a number of reasons – I’m not going into too much detail on these reasons in this post.

What is BYOD?

The best way of describing BYOD is that employees are allowed to bring in their personal smartphones, and connect these with corporate services – currently primarily email. Some organisations will allow more access and others will restrict access, but both models will allow these devices to access corporate data.

Another term that some users might be familiar with is BYOT, which broadens the scope slightly, and allows employees to Bring Your Own Technology. This would cover the likes of computers, iPads and other systems.

One of the appealing factors for implementing either BYOD or BYOT is that the responsibility and maintenance of the device falls with the employee, and no longer becomes a device that the local IT team has to support. Maintenance, support and warranty is managed by the person, and their relationship with the e.g. smartphone provider.

What organisations need to manage and support is the integration points with email. Some stats suggests that 90% of employees are already using their own technology at work, for e.g. LinkedIn activities, Twitter, internet browsing, etc. These services are using 3rd party networks, such as Vodafone, BT or O2 data networks. Again, these are links that the organisation doesn’t (need to) support.

However, to safeguard corporate and client data, organisations can’t just allow devices access their data without some level of security. Data could potentially be stored on these devices and if stolen or lost, confidential data could be accessed and used by external parties – parties that should not have access to this data and that might use it for malicious. purposes.

Because of the importance of these issues, HiberniaEvros has decided to enter this market, not with our own device, but with a MDM (mobile device management) solution from Zenprise – a world leader in addressing the challenges brought about by the BYOD / BYOT concept.

The above just scratches the surface and complexity of BYOD, we’re happy to discuss this technology in more detail and work on a solution that meets your requirements and supports your business strategy.

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